Study of the interface between Christian belief
and education in foreign languages and literatures requires attention to
relevant developments not only in disciplines such as literary studies or
applied linguistics, but also in theology. Theological reflection on cultural
difference and relationships between cultures, while far from being the only
relevant theological discussion, is particularly pertinent. A recent work that
deserves the attention of scholars concerned with Christianity and education in
foreign languages and literatures is the recent collection of essays by
prominent missiologist Andrew Walls published under the title The
Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis/Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 2002). A central theme of the book is the nature of the interaction
between Western Christianity and non-Western cultures as reflected in the
history of Protestant missions to Africa and India—a topic already pertinent to
current discussions of language education given the rise in published reflection
on the relationship between ESL teaching and colonial power. Walls’ explorations
of the encounter between Western missionaries and non-Western cultures are
rather more detailed and nuanced than the over-simplifications that can be found
in some recent writings by applied linguists and language educators. The
relevance of his book to readers of this journal goes, however, beyond the
provision of healthy historical nuance, for he also develops some contours of a
positive theological account of the relationship of contemporary Christianity to
the task of cross-cultural communication.

Two basic strands of Walls’ argument seem
particularly pertinent to discussions of the place of foreign language education
in Christian educational settings. The first has to do with the nature of the
movement of Christianity through history. Walls draws a contrast between Islam
and Christianity in terms of the dynamics of their growth. Islam, he notes, “can
point to a steady geographical progression from its birthplace and from its
earliest years” and during this period “has not had many territorial losses to
record” (13). It also carries substantial fixed cultural content tied to the
Qur’an in heaven, Mecca on earth and Arabic as the perfect medium for its
message. Christianity, on the other hand, has expanded in serial rather than
progressive fashion—rather than expanding outwards territorially, it has
undergone a series of cultural translations, moving into new and marginal
cultural territories and dying away in areas that were once its heartlands. This
continuous movement into new cultural settings is not accidental: “For
Christians ... the divine Word is translatable, infinitely translatable. The
very words of Christ himself were transmitted in translated form in the earliest
documents we have, a fact surely inseparable from the conviction that in Christ,
God’s own self was translated into human form.”(29) The profoundest expressions
of Christianity are thus often “local and vernacular”, arising from the
penetration of a particular cultural location and context by the Gospel rather
than the adoption of a supra-historical or culturally uniform set of Christian
practices. Christianity began as a demographically Jewish phenomenon, but
already within the pages of the New Testament a process of cultural adjustment
and translation becomes visible as an initially Jewish church spreads across the
culturally Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean. By the time Jerusalem fell, the
“Hellenistic-Roman” model of Christianity was well established, but a few
centuries later the Roman world was in turn to face its terminal crisis, at
which time the heartlands of Christianity moved further North into Northern
Europe. In more recent times, there has been a shift first from Europe to North
America and then most recently from Western countries to Africa, Asia and Latin
America: “in the year 1800 well over 90 percent of the world’s professing
Christians lived in Europe or North America. Today, something like 60 percent of
them live in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Pacific, and that proportion is
rising year by year.” (31) Over the past century alone, Walls points out, the
number of professing Christians in Africa has risen from around 10 million to
somewhere in the region of 300 million.

The key point here, however, is not simply one
of numerical shift, but one of cultural shift. These changes in the center of
gravity of the Christian world have been inseparable from the development of new
expressions of Christian faith and practice woven into new cultural settings. A
continuing process of cross-cultural encounter and translation has therefore
been an important part of both the spread of Christianity and its historical
survival as past cultural incarnations of the faith wane in influence. This has,
moreover, not been a matter of the expansion of a culturally homogeneous set of
practices into new territories, but rather a constant process of retranslation
in which both the new cultural setting and the self-understanding of
Christianity are changed through their interaction.

This does not, of course, mean that the
Christian church has not regularly attempted to impose particular cultural
assumptions and practices along with the faith itself during such cross-cultural
encounters, nor that Christians have not often assumed that their particular
cultural expression of Christian faith is universally normative—Walls provides
plenty of examples. His argument, however, is that such efforts and beliefs run
counter to the theological heart of Christianity itself and to the larger
patterns of its diffusion across history. Cross-cultural learning is essential
to the identity and history of Christianity, not merely something that resides
at its fringes.

This point is reinforced by a second important
strand in Walls’ argument, one that focuses more on the present than on the
past. The book’s fourth essay is titled “The Ephesian Moment: At a Crossroads in
Christian History.” In this essay, Walls begins by reemphasizing that the
Christian story is incarnationally grounded within history, and that “genuine
manifestations of Christ cannot be separated from specific segments of social
reality that occur in time.” (74) Accordingly, “we are not the final stage of
Christian formation. Others will look at us and see, perhaps with wonder, our
incompleteness.” (73) At the same time, the particularities of cultural location
have to be placed alongside the call in Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians to grow
into a shared maturity. Walls relates Paul’s reminder that in union with Christ
“you too are being built together with all the others to become a place where
God lives through his Spirit” (Ephesisans 2:22) to the cultural differences and
tensions between Jewish and Hellenistic believers in the early church. The
church must be one since Christ is one, affirming in his humanity all of
humanity in all of its cultural diversity. Believers of different cultural
backgrounds and practices are therefore to become parts of a single body, not
through cultural homogenization but through a common yet particularized
grounding in Christ. Each part of the body retains its difference, yet needs the
others for maturity:

“The Ephesian metaphors of the temple and of the
body show each of the culture-specific segments as necessary to the body but as
incomplete in itself. Only in Christ does completion, fullness, dwell. And
Christ’s completion, as we have seen, comes from all humanity, from the
translation of the life of Jesus into the lifeways of all the world’s cultures
and subcultures through history. None of us can reach Christ’s completeness on
our own. We need each other’s vision to correct, enlarge, and focus our own;
only together are we complete in Christ.” (79, alluding to Ephesians 4:13)

Finally, Walls returns to the changing realities
of the present day. With the heartlands of Christian faith shifting from the
West to Africa, Asia and Latin America (even as Christian presence continues in
the West), and increasing migration, often in the opposite direction (Walls
cites UN figures suggesting that immigration could push the population of the US
to 400 million by 2050), Walls sees the advent of an “Ephesian moment” in which
the church is “more culturally diverse than it has ever been before” (81) and
also mainly a church of the poor. He suggests that the “question at the Ephesian
moment is whether or not the church in all its diversity will demonstrate its
unity by the interactive participation of all its culture-specific segments, the
interactive participation that is to be expected in a functioning body.” (81)
Once again cross-cultural learning and cross-cultural communication edge towards
center stage as essential parts of the mature expression of Christian faith.

Many of the readers of and contributors to this
journal work in the context of North American Christian education, that is, in
educational institutions shaped by Western cultural and theological assumptions.
Western cultural assumptions have typically included the normality of
monolingualism (we refer, for instance, to the learning of additional languages
as “second language acquisition,” revealing the assumption that one
language is the standard model) and have acknowledged the utility of serious
cross-cultural learning only at the margins. This is reflected in the repeated
need to make a case for continued support for foreign language and
cross-cultural learning in educational institutions. The picture that Walls
draws of the path of Christianity through history and its present global
situation offers grounds for a long, hard look at these assumptions on the part
of Christian educational institutions in the West; the interest of his book
therefore reaches well beyond the bounds of missiology narrowly conceived. It is
a book that would repay the attention of foreign language educators who desire
to explore constructive relationships between Christian faith and cross-cultural
learning and to find ways of articulating the importance of such learning within
Christian educational institutions.

Introduction to volume 6

This sixth volume of the Journal of Christianity
and Foreign Languages once again brings a rich tapestry of topics with some
interesting interconnections. Dianne Zandstra and Deborah Berho both focus on
political realities in the history of Argentina, the former exploring the use of
the grotesque by Griselda Gambaro, and the latter providing an analysis of
religious metaphor in the political discourse of Juan Domingo Perón. These two
papers examine from opposite ends of the spectrum the relationship between
religion and political power in Argentina. Phyllis Mitchell and Jolene Vos-Camy
share a concern for helping students to authentically encounter a foreign other
in the language classroom, whether through an understanding of Lituma’s
cross-cultural experiences in the novel Lituma en los Andes or through
coming to terms with the different cultural norms that shape the interactions
between characters in the French film Un Air de Famille. In the Forum,
Herman De Vries contributes a meditation on the kind of attentiveness needed to
encounter language and its speakers in ethically adequate ways. The Forum
also contains a collection of short pieces on the use (and misuse) of the Bible
in language classrooms and a survey of recent work on teaching literature in
Christian settings. The review section includes reviews of two books by NACFLA
member Lindy Scott, plus a review of a recent volume by Bill Johnston that gives
attention to the relationship between morality, faith and language teaching. We
hope that this varied material will provide much scope for fruitful reflection.